Notes from MAPCAACA

I am in Philadelphia for the second time in a month, this time for the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture conference. It's a smallish gathering -- probably under 200 attendees, total -- and so far there have been some particularly interesting sessions about childhood and children's culture. I sat through about half of a media studies session; the first paper (on the construction of quality among professional media critics) was very interesting, but I was driven out of the room by a series of incredibly ignorant stereotypes, bone-headed observations and sweeping generalizations by the next speaker. I was particularly struck by the presenter's assertion that that James Bond and Playboy arrived on the American scene "at the same time". Which I suppose is true, from the perspective of someone born in 1980. (mrowrrr...)

What can you with with an AMST degree? (continued)

We usually have between 8 and 15 American Studies majors out doing internships or community-based projects every term, year-round. I've asked them to introduce themselves to the AMST community and describe their internships and how they connect with their major. Enjoy!

What's in your news?

I subscribe to a mess of RSS feeds, mostly about race and antiracism, lifehacks/voluntary simplicity and Web 2.0. I also read the (real) Washington Post every day, the Prince George's Gazette every week and the Diamondback semi-regularly. My ears are busy, too. Besides listening to various podcasts as I walk to campus, my radio is tuned to the news on NPR while I eat breakfast and cook dinner, and conservative talk radio while I drive. Oh, and I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and subscribe to about a dozen listserves. These help me keep up with events and controversies from the local to the global, and frankly, some times I am exhausted.

Perhaps 2-3 hours of my day is typically spent on "news", broadly defined. (Of course, some of that time is shared with other tasks, such as chopping vegetables.) But it leads me to an odd phenomenon of American Studies: if you're a serious AMSTer, it's hard to avoid the flow of input or turn off what seems to be constant reflection and criticism.

I'm a costume historian with and interest in popular fashion, and I can't go to the local mall without finding grist for my intellectual mill. It's exciting and fun on one hand, but it can also be overwhelming. How does someone who "does" American culture and society of a living manage information overload and take time off?

What do you do with a degree in American Studies?

New Journalism (though it might be old be now) -- Tom Wolfe
Stand-up comedy -- Janeane Garofalo
Viral videos and performance art -- Tay Zonday, aka Adam Nyerere Bahner, "Chocolate Rain"
Broadcast journalism -- Katie Couric

Anyone know any more famous AMSTers?

It's for the What is American Studies unit in AMST 201 this fall.

Summer Excursions in DC

Members of the AMST@Maryland community who are in the area for the summer have some wonderful leisure options. (Even though the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is over.) Last week I spent one afternoon at the National Building Museum enjoying the food, the ambiance and two marvelous exhibits. For newcomers, the NBM is a private (ie, not free*) museum that wins the Paoletti hat-trick of awards: easiest Metro access**, best gift shop and best food value. I defy anyone to get lost trying to find it. You take the Red Line to Judiciary Square and follow the signs to the National Building Museum. It practically falls on you on the escalator. (One of my favorite DC memories is going to the NBM on the even of Clinton's first inauguration and arriving at the top of the escalator to find Aretha Franklin in a floor-length ermine coat posing for a photographer in front of the museum entrance.)

Inside, you'll be in the spectacular Great Hall, roughly the size of a football field (116' x 316') and seven stories high. There's a fountain in the center and a cafe (operated by Firehook Bakery & Coffeehouse -- I got a 20-ounce iced coffee for under $2). The gift shop -- named the best museum store in DC by the Washington Post -- is my favorite destination for wedding and holiday shopping. Right now they have a great display of books about green architecture and green home products.

The current exhibits are "David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture", through January 21 (yay, Motel of the Mysteries!) and "Reinventing the Globe: A Shakespearean Theater for the 21st Century", through October 8. You needn't be a material culture geek to enjoy either one, and the Macaulay exhibit is particularly kid-friendly.

What other amusements are people finding in the area?


*Yes, there's a suggested donation of $5, but no one objects to visitors paying what they can afford (you just drop it in an acrylic cube at the entrance, and no one's counting).

**Unfortunately, the Metro access is much less awesome if you have a large stroller or wheelchair. You'll need to take the elevator to street level and head to the G Street entrance on the opposite side of the building.

environment and "campus culture"

Yesterday's Washington Post reports that 280 colleges, including the University of Maryland, "have agreed to raise awareness about global warming and limit their institutions' emissions." This is, I think, good news. I find myself wondering, however, what changes we'll see on campus. In particular, will the university limit emissions, or will it take a more comprehensive approach and limit environmentally-damaging products on campus as well?

I'm thinking specifically of two things that I've found jarring on campus. The first is the number of people I see walking around with disposable containers (presumably for food they just bought) made of plastic or Styrofoam. The second is the number of cars I see on campus. Food containers don't burn fossil fuels, but they do require fossil fuels to make, and they're not biodegradable. And cars, of course, do emit toxins. So my question is: why do we have so much plastic, and so many cars, on campus? I don't think we have to, but eliminating them will probably require a change in the way we think here on campus, a change in our campus culture.

As an example, we might turn to one of the universities that our administration has dubbed an "aspirational peer institution." At the University of California, you won't see nearly as many non-biodegradable food containers as you will here. One reason is that Styrofoam was banned by the city of Berkeley years ago. Indeed, it's possible that the city's environmental laws are part of the reason there are very few fast food places near the Berkeley campus: fast food restaurants create a lot of garbage. Typically, they pass the cost of this garbage onto society--what economists call "negative externalities"--in the form of environmental cleanup. But when a city forces them to clean up their own garbage, they don't find it as profitable, because they must bear their own costs. Hence, Berkeley is a college town without much fast food, but with a relatively large number of independently-owed and environmentally-friendly restaurants. I don't know the degree to which environmental laws have affected Berkeley's campus culture or its cityscape, much less the incentives of fast-food franchises, but I think it's safe to say that the prevalence of independent and environmentally-conscious food places--places like our coop here on campus--have been good for both people and the environment.

As for cars, I'm often surprised that Campus Drive is a parking lot during the day. I find it hard to believe that anyone finds either gridlock or automobile fumes pleasant. Why so many cars? Especially when we have such a large parking area? Looking again at Berkeley, we find that students can't get parking permits unless they can show that they commute from more than two miles away. All remaining students must use public transportation. Despite the inconvenience, Berkeley denizens seem to prefer their current environment to an alternative environment with more parking and food-related trash. I suspect Marylanders would also.

What would happen if Maryland limited the number of cars, and the amount of garbage, on campus? No doubt some individuals would find this inconvenient. And we'd probably need better public transportation to make sure everyone could get where they needed to be. But would the inconvenience be worth a cleaner campus? And the knowledge that we weren't contributing to an environmental crisis caused disproportionately by the US? Indeed, there may come a time when we don't have a choice, when we simply don't have enough resources to choose an environmentally-unfriendly path. In the meantime, I think it's well worth considering ways of making the campus, the country, and the world more environmentally-friendly, even if that means reevaluating our campus culture.

First Course in American Studies

My big project for this summer is a major overhaul of our introductory course, AMST 201. After years of being offered in small, single-section format, we are moving to a large (for us, anyway) lecture of 100 students with 25-student discussion sections. My vision for the weekly "lecture" session is a multimedia talk show (think Dick Cavett, not Jerry Springer) with invited guests, media clips and performances organized around a theme.

To help me document this effort, I've invited Chirag Patel, a former student, to serve as my project manager and "Boswell", helping me articulate the rationale behind course decisions and record them for future use. We will be interacting through a new blog, First Course in American Studies, which is linked to this one. Please feel free to join the discussion; faculty, students (grad and undergrad), alumni and interested observers are all welcome.

Orientalism in the News

The inimitable Glenn Greenwald, in his blog on Tuesday, points out a frightening piece of Orientalism spewed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reported in The Sunday Times. What so appalled Greenwald--quite understandably--was the following comment by Blair:

I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.

When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.

What’s more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren’t they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is that I could tell it was the first time he had even heard the alternative argument.

There's just so much wrong with this comment that it's hard to know where to begin. Greenwald has done an admirable job detailing the grotesquely imperialistic worldview that Blair's statement reveals, and I would encourage everyone to read his entire post. For my purposes, however, it's sufficient to focus on one aspect: orientalism.

The term "orientalism," most famously articulated by the late Edward Said, refers to the grand narrative that Europeans told themselves about the "orientals" of the Middle East, that those peoples, mostly Muslims and Arabs, were irrational, effeminate, ungovernable, childlike, and inferior. Having thus created a self-contained representation of the "oriental," Imperial Europe could justify its colonization of the Middle East as bringing superior European values to inferior beings. As but one grand experiment in Orientalist thinking, we have Iraq, which Britain colonized, and, when finally driven out in 1958, left a mess in its wake. Fifty years later, Britain decided once again that Iraqis were incapable of governing themselves, and regime change was in order; Britain is once again occupying Iraq, and Iraq is once again a colonial disaster that a majority of Iraqis now say is even worse than Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.

What, then, of Tony Blair's comments? He says that the person he was speaking to had probably never even considered his argument. I would guess that that's because his argument is too stupid to give any serious thought to. Would we really expect Iraqis to be happy that Blair removed a brutal and dictatorial regime? Perhaps we would, if nothing else had changed. But other things did change: even notwithstanding the Iraqi regime was itself a product of Britain's long history of imperial domination, the answer is still "no," because the cost of removing that regime was too high.

We might well ask the following of Tony Blair: if England invaded the US; and then banned both the Democratic and Republican parties (justified because neither of them has positive approval ratings); and then banned the military; and then banned the police; and then let everyone out of jail (in fairness, it was Hussein, not Blair, that did this, as part of his last-ditch effort to forestall an invasion); and then bombed infrastructure so that medical care was unavailable, unemployment was 60%, electricity (including for air conditioning and refrigeration) was available only one hour per day, sewage covered the streets, and clean water was available only sporadically; and at the end of 4 years was still occupying the country while having killed somewhere between 2.5% to 4% of the population (roughly the equivalent of a 9-11 every two-and-a-half days, or 8-12 million Americans); would we be happy about it? And if everything wasn't going swimmingly, would we blame it on Americans?

I doubt many Americans would be happy with this situation. But Blair seems to believe Iraqis should be grateful for exactly this situation. He seems unable to comprehend that he might have something to do with the disaster that is Iraq. On the contrary, he's the noble Englishman who can do no wrong. Therefore, if there's anything wrong in Iraq, it must be Iraqis' fault. And why shouldn't he blame the victim? After all, it's quite convenient to do so when the victim is either dead, dying, or too busy trying not to get blown up to be heard.

This is the beauty of orientalism. It means Tony Blair doesn't have to worry about what the people he speaks for think, or what they want, or how many of them die. All that matters is that they should be grateful.

Introduction, virtuality, exceptionalism

Greetings, gentle reader. My name is Asim, and I'm a doctoral candidate in American Studies. My main research interest is cyberculture (and media studies more generally), but I'm also interested in race/racism/slavery, and religion in American culture. I received a master's degree in economics here at Maryland, and I'm currently directing a group in AMST called The Project on Religion, Culture, and Globalization.

In her last post, Jo mentioned the connection between our real and virtual worlds, and specifically Linden dollars. On a related note, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the virtual community known as Second Life suffered a pecuniary--both real and virtual--loss, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's commercially-run island was "bombed."

My first thought was to ask "why?" Why would someone attack a virtual island? Indeed, why do we have virtual islands in the first place? What do we get from them? Why do people go there? What does this all mean? Of what relation are the virtual and the real? To what degree are they overlapping? I once heard Deepak Chopra say on TV that we don't experience reality, but only our perceptions of it--but if that's true, does it follow that there's there no difference between the virtual and the real? Is the real collapsing into the virtual? Or vice versa?

I don't have answers to these questions. In fact, I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions. All I'm sure of is that ABC is out some (real) money.

In other news: one of the first things I learned about in American Studies was the trope of American exceptionalism, which is, roughly speaking, a fixation on what makes America not just unique but superior. At its worst, American exceptionalism is an ideology of national and racial self-aggrandizement that was (and still is) used to justify all sorts of horrible treatment of people deemed inferior. I was reminded of this as I came across a most remarkable piece of American exceptionalism in yesterday's Washington Post. Under the hopeful title U.S., Iran Open Dialogue On Iraq, we have this statement from "U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker":

"This is about actions, not just principles, and I laid out to the Iranians direct, specific concerns about their behavior in Iraq and their support for militias that are fighting Iraqi and coalition forces," he said. Crocker said he did not present a dossier of evidence, but he impressed upon his Iranian counterpart that the United States was "looking for results" and wanted "a change in Iranian behavior."

The first question one might ask about this exchange is perhaps the most obvious: why is there a US Ambassador to Iraq? The US is, after all, occupying Iraq, while Iraq's "government" apparently does not even control Baghdad, much less the country. As for the charge that Iran is supporting the insurgency, as Juan Cole has repeatedly and convincingly explained on his excellent blog, that's highly unlikely. The reason is simple: Iran is a Shia Muslim country that supports the current Shia Iraqi government. The insurgency is based in the Sunni areas of Iraq, and includes some of Iran's enemies, among them Sunni groups (like al-Qaida, which finally found space to operate in Iraq after the US invasion created a power vacuum), and members of Baath Party. This would be the same Baath Party that controlled Iraq during its war with Iran. Indeed, the US not only supported Iraq during its war with Iran, but also quashed Iran's complaint to the UN that Iraq was using banned chemical weapons. So, Iran clearly has no desire to fund the insurgents, and no need to fund the Shias in Iraq, some of whom control militias powerful enough that their death squads have been able to murder Sunnis with impunity.

Crocker's comments, while ridiculous, point to an important aspect of our government's position regarding Iran: it's basically an essentialist position, one in which Iran is essentially and inherently evil--it is, after all, a member of George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil"--and the US is inherently and exceptionally good. That's why, in this view, the US has the right to label entire nations "evil." That's why it has the right to attack and occupy Iraq, and then repeatedly, and without apparent irony, accuse Iran of meddling in Iraq's internal affairs.

I suspect members of the Bush Administration are not so blinkered that they can't see the inconsistency of their position. But the fact that they keep repeating it indicates that they think it'll still play well with Americans, that they can invoke American exceptionalism to obscure the illogic of their foreign policy. It could be, of course, that referring to the Bush Administration's ideology as exceptionalism is to overstate the case; it could be merely bluster. But either way, it's reiterating a long history of saying "you have to do what we say because we're us and you're not."

It's worth noting that our government's contradictory behavior--on the one hand insisting that Iran is intractably evil, and on the other engaging in dialogue with it--is itself probably a result of a simple-minded approach rooted in the notion of America as a mythic force of, as George W. Bush often says, "freedom and democracy." Having thoroughly bad-mouthed Iran, anything less than continued brinksmanship will be seen as backing down in the face of evil. But Iraq is a mess, and the US needs all the help it can get. And so the tough-guy talk continues, even while dialogue finally begins.

It's also worth noting that the American Studies Association in 2006 called for "the end of the war and the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq." When I first read this resolution, I have to admit I was a bit surprised that an academic organization would take such a position on a political issue. I'm not sure, in retrospect, why I was surprised. But whatever the reason, it's clear to me now that the ASA's opposition to the war is not an ideological position, but an academic one. Just as geological evidence leads geologists to support evolution and not creationism, so too historical and cultural evidence leads Americanists to oppose the war. I have no doubt that there's much disagreement about the war among American Studies students and faculty, but on the whole, I can't find fault with the ASA's opposition to the war. Indeed, most Americans would now seem to agree with that position.

When worlds collide

It had to happen. Online gamers can now get a VISA credit card which earns World of Warcraft gametime. Three years ago there was a  student in my AMST 201 making about a thousand dollars a month in his spare time creating and then selling characters on Everquest. I realized that anyone who thinks online entertainment is just a hobby for nerds is missing the emergence of an entirely new society, complete with subculture, politics and its own economy. So here is one more point of connection between the "real world" (if credit can be considered real compared to cash) and cyberculture. What I want to know is how soon will I be able to get a rewards card that earns me Linden dollars?

Introduction and notes from Town Hall

Hello everyone, my name is Mateo. I am currently wrapping up my second year as an MA student in American Studies. My areas of concentration are Science, Technology & Society (STS) and Feminist Technoscience studies. My Master’s Thesis (which is slowly coming together) is on the political history of gerontology/ethnogerontology and Alzheimer’s disease. I will be graduating this spring with hundreds of other happy people.

Background:
I came to the University of Maryland after graduating from Oberlin College with a degree in chemistry and working in the Bay Area for several years. My first job after college was in the pharmaceutical industry as a medicinal chemist. I synthesized anti-retroviral drug candidates for HIV-1 and Hepatitis C. After a couple of years, I got sick of the industry, and started working at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) as a qualitative interviewer.

During this time I also worked with the California Prison Focus (CPF). My work focused on health care in men and women’s maximum-security prisons. I was responsible for acquiring information about the various anti-retroviral drugs inmates were being prescribed. While working with CPF, I visited several of the California prisons and conducted in-depth interviews with transgender and non-transgender men and women. I ran a monthly radio show with a local California radio station on various aspects of the California Department of Defense (CDC).

Notes from Town Hall: Friday 04.27.07 from 11.00-12.30

Last Friday a handful of American studies graduate students (GSAS), Professor Jo Paoletti , and Dr. Nancy Struna came together to discuss current departmental matter. The meeting provided a great opportunity to hear about departmental plans (for the future) and graduate student concerns.

Professor Nancy Struna discussed the department's new strategic plan. In general, the plan consists of the following four components:

1. Down Size

The department plans to reduce the number of graduate students admitted into the Ph. D program. The goal is to bring in five Ph. D students every year. This is part of a university wide effort to downsize the graduate student body and raise the quality.

2. Graduate Student Funding

Professor Nancy Struna has submitted a grant proposal to improve funding packages for American studies graduate students. The money will be used to provide an incoming graduate student with a fellowship and half time TA ship (similar to CRGE)

The department is also trying to raise the stipend for at least one of the existing fellowships offered to incoming graduate students.

Note on funding: The state of Maryland only gives the department enough money for two fellowships and 4.5 assistantships.

3. New Faculty
Next year we will have two new faculty members joining our department. Our new faculty members will have joint appointments in LGBT studies and Women Studies. The two new faculty members are Dr. Christina Hanhardt (Ph. D., American Studies, NYU) and Dr. Jeffrey McCune (Ph. D., Performance Studies, Northwestern University). For more details check out the American Studies website: http://www.amst.umd.edu/NewsEvents/newhiresrelease.htm.

4. Center for Leadership and Organizational Change

Priority has been given to developing a center for the study of everyday life. The center will be a resource for post docs., graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty members. The content focus will be on social justice issues within and outside of the University. At the moment, potential funding sources for the center are being researched.

Issues and Concerns

In addition to all of the exciting news, we also discussed graduate student concerns and issues. Here are some of the issues raised by graduate students at the meeting:

1. Student engagement and professionalization

-Why are graduate students not involved?
-How do we get people to initiate projects and increase a sense of community within the department?
-Why are AMST graduate students not doing more?

Popular Theories/Speculative answers to these questions

-graduate students in AMST are not “pro-active” enough
-a combination of internal and external factors (funding, personalities, multiple interests, work)
-people are too busy
-people are doing a bunch of stuff but most of us are scattered all across campus
-it is a departmental problem
-things have actually improved in the last two years, it is not fair to blame everything any single factor (especially overworked graduate students)

2. The need for a Graduate Student Handbook
-A very smart graduate student brought up the need for an American Studies graduate student handbook!

Why?
-students should know about insurance cost
-fellows should be informed of the need to pay taxes

In short, there is a lot of information that graduate students need to know, but don’t get until the last minute. The handbook would be a valuable resource for incoming and existing graduate students.

3. Seminar Series
-faculty and students would like to revamp the faculty student seminar series next year

4. Plans for the new center
-How will our center be unique, yet compatible with other existing research centers/programs (CRGE, Latino/Latina studies, LGBT, Driskell Center, Asian American Studies)?

Announcements

Professor Jo Paoletti has received a grant from the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) to create a writing rubric.

Congratulations Professor Paoletti!!!! This is really fantastic!

My comments…

I chose to make this my first entry because I think it is important to be informed about the resources available in our department. I left the meeting feeling a bit frustrated with the lack of communication among graduate students. I know of several people in the department who are doing some really great work. Surprisingly,there is a sense that American studies graduate students are “not doing enough.”

I think the main issue here is lack of communication among graduate students, not lack of motivation. It sometimes feels as though we all live in our own little worlds…and in many ways I guess we do. I am not sure this can change completely. We simply cannot attend every talk, meeting, movie screening, or cultural event on campus. We have to pick and choose carefully how we spend our time and energy. On the other hand, I think we can easily be more strategic about circulating information about the cool stuff we are doing.

I think it is important to have some sort of forum dedicated to ‘making public’ all of the great things American Studies graduate students are involved in. I hope that this new bog might provide a low-pressure environment to engage each other.

AMST@Maryland welcomes new bloggers

I'd like to welcome three new bloggers to AMST@Maryland: Mateo Munoz, Maria Velazquez and Asim Ali. I will let them do their own introductions in their initial posts. For me, this is a huge step towards AMST@Maryand representing the community and not just a single voice.Right now, we are experimenting with three-month term for guest bloggers, to ensure a steady supply of fresh viewpoints. We could probably accommodate a few more to start over the summer, if anyone is interested. Faculty, undergraduates and graduate students are all included in that invitation.

The Evils of Comic Books

Comic artist/blogger Neal Van Flue ran across a 1954 encyclopedia entry about comics which includes, amidst the fairly accurate historical background, some fairly strong accusations about the bad effects of comic books on children. The source of their power, according to the original article's author, was the combined use of words and visuals, which "no other kind of literature" does. The two main arguments against comic books are ones I heard repeatedly throughout my youth in the 1950s. First, some of them dealt with crime and "other wicked acts"and might influence young readers to imitate them. Second, low-quality comic books do not help children "develop good taste in literature". It cheers me considerably to note that the encyclopedia was absolutely right in his appraisal of the inspirational power of comic books. The opening scene in Stephen Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (co-authored by George Lucas) was based on Disney artist Carl Banks' Scrooge McDuck comic "The Seven Cities of Cibola". My brother and I read that comic until it was ragged, and apparently so did Lucas and Spielberg and a whole bunch of kids who grew up to be film critics and spotted the similarity when the movie came out in 1981.

Comic books, of course, have been replaced by new multimedia evils since 1954: television, music videos, computer games and MySpace. And I am sure that tragedies such as Columbine and Virginia Tech will continue to prompt cultural critics to decry the "dark side" of those amusements. But bear in mind that Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus has probably inspired a few copycat crimes in its 400-year existence, as well.

Nice White Lady

In AMST 498J today, the discussion will focus on popular culture images of teachers, especially the "magical hero teacher" myth. I plan to start with "Blackboard Jungle" (Mild-mannered English teacher Glenn Ford tames Sidney Poitier and defeats Vic Morrow) and discuss how the heroic teacher stories can shape viewers' attitudes toward teachers, at-risk students and learning. This narrative is so familiar that it is a frequent subject of parody; as in the Family Guy episode "Fast Times at Cianci Jr. High") and, more recently, the "Nice White Lady" sketch on MadTV. So we have the myth, and the humorous opposition; where does that leave the actual at-risk students? Could it be that the "teacher as hero" stories and the parodies both help maintain our unequal educational system?

Report from PCA/ACA 2007

I've just returned from the 2007 conference of the Popular Culture and American Culture Association. AMST@UM was well-represented by about a dozen of us, mostly graduate students and a few undergraduate students. PCA/ACA has been one of my favorite conferences for decades -- it is always lively, open and surprising. It's also deteminedly accessible, despite a tendency toward reading papers (as opposed to presentations from papers). Most of the papers are written for an interdisciplinary audience, which means that assumptions are unpacked and jargon explained. I will admit to having diminishing patience with those who research and write about everyday culture in non-everyday language. I've always suspected it was in the interest of self-protection; if the reality TV/romance/Seinfeld fans you are writing about can't understand you, they can't argue with your (mis)interpretation of their experiences.

The saddest thing about attending PCA/ACA (or any large convention) is the impossibilitiy of hearing all the papers and making all the connections you'd like -- with 2,800 attendees, 799 sessions and an average of four papers per session over the course of four twelve-hour days, the best I could have done would be to hear perhaps six a day, and since I wear out fast, I only manage half that. (It's also necessary to skip sessions if you want to have an in-depth talk with someone, as often happens.) Discoveries/delights this time: wonderful session from librarians and archivists on new media, including Wikipedia and Youtube. A new PCA area: Senior Culture; inevitable with all the aging Boomer pop culture scholars, but promising some interesting moments.
There were the usual PCA/ACA moments as well: 25 sessions devoted to mystery and detective fiction, the annual Sci-Fi area film viewing (A 30th anniversary screening of "Star Wars: A New Hope") and Ray and Pat Browne, the George and Martha Washington of PCA, holding court near the registration table.

Mark your calendars: March 19-22, 2008 in San Francisco. (During the UM spring break, for a change!)

Blogging yesterday

Here's an interesting twist on blogging. While most bloggers post reactions/ruminations/commentary about current events, Shorpy is dedicated to old news -- real old news. Billed as "A 100-year-old photo blog", Shorpy features public domain photographs and news items from the early 20th century, like the Lewis Hine photographs of child laborers. Sadly, requests for comments have gone unanswered; the chirp of crickets resound though the site. I had the same problem with a blog I created last year, which was basically my 1965 diary transcribed with added commentary and pictures. It would be cool to find more bloggers who are blogging primary sources from the past, as it seems to be a tantalizing use of the medium.

What's the message now, Marshall?

Cory Doctorow has a wonderful article in Locus magazine online, "You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen" . In it, he discusses the technological differences between print media (specifically, the novel) and digital, online media. He weaves snippets of his own thoughts and actions into the article in a great stream-of consciousness manner, demonstrating the cognitive changes digital media have promoted. ( "This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items") We can bemoan the decline of book reading (or, conversely, the rise of multitasking and fragmented communication) but the technology is here, and with each new medium comes new ways of thinking, a new cultural message to be processed -- concurrently, a transformation of old media.

I no longer "read" novels; I listen to them on my iPod. People used to listen to stories, not read them, before the printing press made 400-page books possible and reading necessary. But today's reader has a choice, and many like myself perceive a novel as a long work of fiction, which might be read silently in book form, read aloud from a book to a listener or listeners, or read to me by one or more performers. Such a performance, in fact, could be a solitary experience (the listener on a bus hearing Meryl Streep reading the Velveteen Rabbit) or a shared one (thousands of James Joyce fans participating in Bloomsday, the annual holiday featuring public readings of Ulysses). Include in this vision the possibility of someone interpreting Ulysses in American Sign Language on Bloomsday, and you see that changing the medium of the novel really does alter the experienced "message" of Joyce's words. Of course, setting his manuscript (written on 27 huge sheets of graph paper) in type and producing a small paperback book also alters his words as he experienced them. I wonder what a "novel" will be one hundred years from now, once it has been completely freed from its paper prison?

Announcing our new blog!

This is a blog for and about American Studies at the University of Maryland. As a program, we focus on the critical analysis of the cultures of everyday life; and cultural constructions of identity and difference. Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favorite newsreader so you won't miss an update. Want to be a guest blogger? Contact Jo Paoletti (jpaol at umd dot edu).